First Burn: an Animatic ALEX EVANS, 5C3 TUTRICE: EDYTA ZENATELLO Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2 What is an Animatic? .............................................................................................................................. 3 About “First Burn” ................................................................................................................................... 4 An Analysis of the Text ............................................................................................................................ 5 The process of an animatic ..................................................................................................................... 9 Recurring Characters ............................................................................................................................. 11 The Equipment I used ........................................................................................................................... 14 Problems I Faced ................................................................................................................................... 15 Other Notes........................................................................................................................................... 16 The Final Project ................................................................................................................................... 18 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 19 Sources .................................................................................................................................................. 20 1 Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 Introduction For this year’s TraPe I decided that I wanted to try something more creative, and I thought about trying animation, before stumbling upon something called an animatic. I really liked it, and decided to try this instead. It was a “Hamilton in 7 minutes” animatic, by szin on YouTube, and I liked the way that the drawings depicted the songs, but without taking away from the music, almost like a supporting act. I looked at a couple of others and found that in others, it was more that the music added to the drawings, in a way that made the art the main focal point, but without the music being unnecessary or unneeded, which I really liked, and the way that the visual renderings of the lyrics are very creative, and that I’ve never seen two artists depict a lyric in the same way. I started thinking about how I would illustrate them, and whenever I listened to a song, I found myself thinking “oh, that would be fun to draw” or “hey, I know how I could draw that” but the ones that sparked my ideas the most were songs from musicals, which I guess is because that’s how musicals tell their stories, and the songs are where most things happen. I decided that I really want to try it out, to try using all the different programmes, and to try thinking up ways to tell a story in pictures, and then drawing it all out, and seeing the finished thing, and then I thought, why not make an animatic for my TraPe? When I tried to decide which song to use, I didn’t know how to choose. I wanted to use a song from a musical, for reasons already stated, but I didn’t know which one. When I finally decided to use a song from Hamilton, because that was the first animatic I ever saw, there was still the problem that Hamilton is almost two and a half hours long, and consists of 46 songs. There were a couple that I almost automatically eliminated, because they either don’t make much sense out of context (like The Reynolds Pamphlet), they’re too short (like The Adams Administration or I Know Him), they’re too long (like My Shot), or they make me cry and I don’t want to have to listen to something almost on repeat if it makes me cry (like Stay Alive (reprise) and The World Was Wide Enough). There are others that I decided to eliminate because one of the reasons I like animatics is because they really show emotions, and some songs in the musical are there purely for the reasons of introducing a character (like Aaron Burr, Sir). I decided on Burn, when I thought to think about the Hamildrops (these are a collection of songs that didn’t make it into the final cut of the musical, and bonus tracks) when I stumbled upon First Burn, the alternative to burn that wasn’t used in the musical. I really liked it, and I really liked the way it was sung and the way that everything almost collided and I had so many ideas already after listening to it once and I decided that I absolutely had to choose this one. So I did. 2 Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 What is an Animatic? An animatic, or a story reel, is the stage in movie or cartoon production that comes between a storyboard and the final production. It shows the key frames and camera movements, and helps to get a feel for the scenes before actually animating, respectively shooting, them. Sometimes animatics contain frame-by-frame animation for important details. In the live-action and animation film industries, they are mostly used as guidelines for a final project. Amongst musical theatre fans, animatics are very popular. Many artists take songs and scenes from their favourite musicals and draw them, some going so far as to make an animatic version of an entire musical. These tend to include a lot more frame-by-frame animation and less camera movements, and are presented as a final project rather than as a step in the production. Many of this kind of animatics are in fact a lot closer to full-on animations than animatics, but are still titled as an animatic, but most are still clearly animatics because of the way that they only use key frames rather than fluid movements. 3 Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 About “First Burn” First Burn is, according to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tweet on the 29th of April 2018, the first draft of “Burn” (a song on the original Hamilton: An American Musical soundtrack in which Eliza expresses her pain and anger at her husband and his affair) and a mood ™. It was written by Lin-Manuel in 2014 (a year before Hamilton: An American Musical’s original release) though it was swapped out for Burn. The final production of First Burn was released as the fifth of the 13 Hamildrops of 2018 (and one in 2017) at Midnight on April 30th. It was sung by five actresses, who were the current Elizas in various casts around the globe at the time of First Burn’s release, Lexi Lawson, Arianna Afsar, Shoba Narayan, Rachelle Ann Go and Julia Harriman. It was produced by Mike Elizondo, who worked with rappers such as Dr. Dre and Eminem, and Alex Lacamoire, who produced (and was the original musical director of) Hamilton. 4 Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 An Analysis of the Text I saved every letter you wrote me, A very important part about Alexander and Eliza’s relationship is the letters that Alexander wrote to Eliza during the war, because these letters were very romantic (and the reason that Eliza fell for Alexander in the first place) and were very special to Eliza, all his letters meant a lot to her. Now, though, very few survive because Eliza did burn most of them. These letters were symbolic of their relationship, which is why burning them was such a drastic measure to take. From the moment I saw you, I knew you were mine, You said you were mine. Do you know what Angelica said Angelica Schuyler-Church (nee Schuyler) was Eliza’s older sister and closest friend. Their younger sister, Margarita (or Peggy) Schuyler was dead at this point, and her death was one of the things that pushed Alexander into overworking, which in turn was one of the reasons he cheated on his wife, for the two of them were very close. When I told her what you’d done? She said “You have married an Icarus, He has flown too close to the sun” Icarus is a young boy from Greek mythology whose father, Daedalus, built the labyrinth to contain the minotaur (a half-bull, half-man creature) of Crete. The king, who the minotaur belonged to, then locked both Daedalus and Icarus in a tower, for they knew how to escape the labyrinth, and the king didn’t want them to tell the eighteen children that were sent to be slaughtered by the minotaur each year how to escape. They then proceeded to make wings out of wax and pigeon feathers so that they could fly to safety. The one thing that Daedalus told his son was that he wasn’t allowed to fly close to the sun. Icarus did fly too close to the sun, and the wax on his wings melted and he drowned. What Angelica means by this comparison is that Alexander has gone too far into the danger zone and that was what brought him crashing down. Don’t take another step in my direction, I can’t be trusted around you. Don't think you can talk your way Alexander Hamilton was known to be very good with words, so good, in fact, that George Washington himself hired Alexander to be his secretary. Here, Eliza means that she is extremely hurt and nothing he has to say can make it right again or make her forgive him. 5 Evans Alex First Burn: An Animatic 2018/2019 Into my arms, into my arms. I’m burning the letters you wrote me You can stand over there if you want I don’t know who you are Eliza means here that the she no longer knows who her husband has become, and that the Alexander she married isn’t the same Alexander who is standing in front of her. I have so much to learn I'm re-reading your letters And watching them burn (burn) I’m watching them burn (burn) You published the letters she wrote you Here, Eliza is talking about the Reynolds Pamphlet, which is a pamphlet that Alexander published in 1797 in which he told the world (and Eliza, she didn’t know about the affair prior to its release) about the affair, painting Maria Reynolds (nee Lewis, also Lewis post-divorce) as a master seductress and himself as the innocent victim.